The commodity futures trading industry has migrated from a primarily voice-brokered and floor-transacted trading environment to one that is predominantly electronic in nature. As a result of the migration to electronically focused trading, trading industries (and particularly the commodities industry) have experienced massive growth in volume and volatility, and expressed a need for fast and ubiquitous access to market data as soon as it becomes available. During this same period, the electronic, computing and mobile industries have seen equally significant growth in hand-held mobile devices and the like. For example, the power and capabilities of current hand-held mobile devices rival those of desktop computing systems from a few years go. Despite the rapid growth in the capabilities of mobile devices, such as the iPOD®, iPhone®, Blackberry®, etc., the commodity futures trading industry, for example, has not yet offered an adequate solution to the problems associated with mobile electronic trading.
While some marginally effective electronic trading solutions exist for the mobile platform, they all suffer from a number of deficiencies. First, many of the trading solutions do not offer real time data streams and up to date quotes as is needed for effective trading. The data that is provided is typically delayed, or it is provided on periodic intervals, such as on a refresh basis. Likewise, the data that is provided is often times truncated so that even the delayed data does not present a complete picture of the trading behavior of a particular issue.
Even for those few systems that do attempt to provide real time data, they are limited to providing the last trade price and other similar market statistics (often on a refresh basis). These systems, however, are unable to (and as a result, do not) provide an extremely important class of data, known as market depth, which is critical for electronic commodity futures trading. Market depth is a price based aggregation of the best current bids and offers for any futures time period, typically ten layers deep, on each side (i.e., the bid and ask). Due to the extreme volatility and physically settled nature of certain financial instruments, and to the large financial positions at stake, commodity futures market participants (e.g., traders) require and demand that market depth information be provided in real-time.
The prior art systems, particularly in the context of mobile devices, suffer from deficiencies in retrieving and/or displaying such forms of critical market data on a real time basis because of the complex nature of the data and the inherent limitations of the systems/devices themselves. For example, typical mobile devices do not have the connectivity (e.g. limited data rate, etc.), screen display space, or functional capabilities needed by traders to effectively and efficiently receive and display real-time data, and execute transaction commands in real-time.
These and other limitations of mobile devices require that information be retrieved, processed, filtered, and displayed in a manner that is less meaningful, precise, and useful than is needed to effectively engage in real-time commodities trading.
In view of the deficiencies of conventional systems and devices, including mobile devices, there is a need for an inventive solution that enables users to effectively and actively trade from a mobile handheld device. In particular, there is a need for a mobile, handheld device that enables users to receive, view, display, sort, manage, transmit, and interact with real-time data and information in a meaningful and precise manner, so as to allow the user to effectively and actively trade in real-time and on-the-go.